Next “Assassin’s Creed” Delayed To 2017

Ubisoft is taking a brief break with its “Assassin’s Creed” video game franchise with 2016 to be the first year since 2008 where a new game in the series will not see a release.

Kotaku, the first to reveal the Victorian England setting of “Assassin’s Creed Syndicate,” reports that the series will take 2016 off only to return in 2017 with a new game currently codenamed ‘Empire’ which will take the series to ancient Egypt.

It marks a welcome shift in time for the franchise which previously had seen its trips into the past growing closer and closer to modern day settings with each subsequent sequel. This seems to reset that unofficial rule, allowing trips to any point in history. Fan polls for the franchise continually place feudal Japan as the top setting yet to be exploited by the series.

In fact, the site claims that the franchise will now shift to a biennial release pattern from this point on, a new game coming every two years rather than annually. To compensate for its 2016 absence, Ubisoft has moved up the release of its “Watch Dogs” sequel to the end of 2016.

The franchise hit a snag with 2014’s “Assassin’s Creed: Unity,” an essentially broken game in a property already suffering franchise fatigue. The poor reception to that appears to have negatively impacted sales for “Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate” which was released late last year.

2016 won’t be entirely ‘Creed’-less though as the “Assassin’s Creed” movie starring Michael Fassbender hits in December. Additionally two further releases in the “Assassin’s Creed Chronicles” series will be coming in the first half of this year, those to be set in India and Russia.